July 24, 2014

Sam Brownback of Kansas: Live from La Farine CCXXV: July 24, 2014

My crazy Democratic opponent thinks that raising taxes is a way to solve the disastrous fiscal meltdown caused by the tax cuts I favored. But everyone knows this solution is insufficiently Reagan because Reagan, and in addition Reagan.

...Gov. Sam Brownback, elected in the 2010 wave, was bolstered in 2012 when conservatives primaried the moderate Republicans who used to run the state. He pushed through deep tax cuts, nixing business taxes and phasing the top income tax rate from 6.45 percent to 3.9 percent, to prove that the supply-side gospel was due for a second great awakening. The subsequent economic slump in the state is probably the best-covered in the country. 'The immediate effect has been to blow a hole in the state’s finances without noticeable economic growth', reported Peter Coy in Businessweek. 'What's wrong with Kansas' tax reform?' asked Governing magazine. In the hearth of the Koch family, it's impossible to find anyone who'll jiggle the balance sheets and pretend the tax cuts work.

Back to Raju, who was in Kansas when more than 100 current and former Republican officeholders endorsed, en masse, Democratic candidate Paul Davis. To the disbelief of Republicans and surprise of pollsters, Davis is consistently tied with Brownback in a state that's steadily trended Republican. Brownback's dismissal of Davis indicates just how he thinks about the long term.... To delay a tax cut is to 'raise taxes', and to be Reaganesque is to rule out any tax raises. The second part of the answer is actually the weakest—-anyone who forgets that Ronald Reagan course-corrected on taxes, 11 times, has mentally substituted a fantasy of Ronald Reagan for the one who governed the country for a bit. But maybe this points to Brownback's salvation. Like Scott Walker, he needs to recast his experiments as a twilight struggle against liberalism. If he loses, so do tax cuts, for now and ever.

Comments

My crazy Democratic opponent thinks that raising taxes is a way to solve the disastrous fiscal meltdown caused by the tax cuts I favored. But everyone knows this solution is insufficiently Reagan because Reagan, and in addition Reagan.